Alistair Darling And Bank Details

My wife and I were watching "Watchdog" last night on BBC One. One of their stories was about the Inland Revenue losing a CD with confidential details for 15 500 people on it. We looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

Today, I'm in a local pub, and I'm having a pint, and I look up at Sky News on the telly.

It's one thing for Alistair Darling to lose millions of records.

It's another for Darling:

- to be in the midst of the Northern Rock crisis
- to lose millions of records, including bank details
- to lose millions of records, including bank details, when they were unencrypted files on discs sent by normal mail.

The HMRC has set up a Child Benefit Helpline on 0845 302 1444 for customers.

The chief advice, from listening to an interview on Radio 5 Live, seems to be to change your banking password immediately, especially if it's your child's name, your maiden name, i.e. something that could be in the lost records. The more drastic option would be to request a new bank account number.

BBC News:

A rather scarier scenario has been put forward by the technology analysts Gartner. They warn that if the information is in the hands of criminals, they could try to take over peoples' bank accounts to remove the money in them. "The data lost - bank account numbers, names and addresses - represents a gold mine for the thieves and is much more valuable to them than credit card numbers or taxpayer id numbers," said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan. "In fact, in the black market, bank account numbers sell for the highest price, or between $30 and $400 (£15 to £200), which is significantly more than the fifty cents to five dollars that criminals pay for credit cards," she said.